Mid Pacific Musings of Artist Ron Pitts: Getting Wet and Salty

Well, every so often I get a kink of nostalgia from way back in the crook of my neck. The kind of kink that only art can flex out. So here I have a piece called Boston Harbor. It would be a near impossibility to see the harbor waterfront like this today - what with all the stinkpot cruise boats - but I do remember a day in the winter looking out the wheelhouse window when there were only a handful commercial boats afloat.

The BIG DIG was to blame.

Boston Harbor

So, with a BREAK IN THE WEATHER, let us stand off the dock here in the Atlantic and lay to the Pacific!

Break in the Weather

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I can’t imagine not starting the OCEAN theme right here in Hawaii. So, as a proud veteran of the Navy of the United States I give you the USS ARIZONA!

USS ARIZONA

Here, she’s plowing through head seas with a full head of steam and heading into the realm of GLORY. I prefer her to be atop the waves as opposed to being embraced by them. God Bless her and her crew.

In diametric opposition I want to show to you The Ship that was named - semantically - JAPANESE, I am talking the greatest battleship ever devised and constructed by man - the YAMATO.

IJN YAMATO

She was standing safely off Pearl Harbor on that fateful morning, providing air cover that was never needed. But she was a party to the dirty deed done by the Zeros and Vals and Kates (fighters, torpedo and dive bombers) and she was a thing of unimaginable beauty. I wish we didn’t have to sink her (with ten torpedo's and seven 1,000 lb bombs!) in operation TEN GO, the GREATEST Kamikaze strike EVER! She’d have made one hell of a Museum Ship.

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But enough of the gallantry of the Pacific, I also did a few “lesser known” starlets from the North Atlantic many years before. The “Look at all my bristling chains and all things bumpy” appearance of the Pre-Dreadnaught HMS Bucchante.

HMS Bucchante

A heavy cruiser that never really rose to her potential until the Germans and the Brits went to war, and at that time, the Bucchante was relegated to coastal patrols of the English coast as the DREADNAUGHTS had risen up ... only to be sunk! The Bucchante and me, we escaped the bullets ...by TIME!.

The Germans - after years in the trenches and senseless loss of life - ended up getting bottled up in Scapa Flow in Scotland after “clearer minds prevailed” and then - on one moonless night, the scuttle cocks were pulled by the German crews and the pride of the captured Germans went to the BOTTOM,

The Kronprinz

The Kronprinz was a jewel and she is still down there - upside down - in the hands of “Old Blighty”.

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Now a spin over to New England and the working docks that I used to call my home... And I may well again.

One never knows.

Find a dock on the eastern seaboard that has a bountiful shellfish bed and you'll find a Culling board. Sure, it slimey.. but ...ahhh. HEY. Enjoy the clams!

Beside the Fruit of the Sea, there's the work of docking ships and barges. I'm not talking the pedestrian ship-a-day like in Kahului Harbor, I mean the mad rush of ships and traffic on the eastern seaboard. (I don't know about Long Beach but I'm sure they would agree). Below is the Ethel Tibbetts -

Ethels Final Sunrise

She was named Karen Tibbetts when I boarded her but after an ugly divorce the name got changed (go figure!) I think she was sexier as Karen...

Then there is the workhorse of all workhorses - the Clydesdale among shetlands - THE HERCULES. I don't know what her bollard pull was as if was never measured - but in a footrace, she beat everybody with her submarine Fairbanks-Morse 20 piston, ten cydinder "opposing piston" mill.